Redefining Best Practices in the BDC

by DAVID JOHNSON

Redefining Best Practices in the BDC

David Johnson is the National Development Director for the Mastery Council, LLC a National BDC & Internet sales training company in Portland, Or. which services the Mastery Council Dealer Group. He can be reached at 503-227-3515 EXT 101 or at [email protected].

Best Practices are defined by dealers the industry thinks and I emphasize thinks are doing something better than most, and who are at the top of their game, at one piece of the car business or another. These lead to benchmarks settings that a dealer feels they should be seeing. One such benchmark is a 50% set rate and a 50% show rate, in other words 2 out of every 10 leads are brought into the store, Funny thing is, the ��industry�� benchmark would have gotten you canned in our BDC.

By definition, Best Practices keeps everybody on a level playing field, even though I see BDC��s out performing industry benchmarks by huge margins everyday. We do this by managing our expectations of what our BDR��s should be accomplishing on a daily basis. We can hold them to this higher standard because we have BDR��s that sell 100 units, month-in and month-out and BDC managers trained to inspire and lead using a specific system that works with the BDR mentality. Which, if you have a BDC, you know is vastly more difficult than that of a sales person.

In order to get BDC��s performing at 100% higher than industry benchmarks you must first find a specific type of person to hire. (Hiring is for another article but we have discovered that you don��t get them from where most dealers think they do.) Now that you have the right people, set the standards early-on and coach daily to maximize potential. Two keys to coaching and development:

1) Which days you train and what time of the day you train.

2) What you train.

Let��s compare the industry benchmarks to our dealer group��s BDC��s. Let��s use a 25% closing rate at the door. Out of 1000 leads using the current industry benchmarks, you would net 62.5 sold units. Using the same closing rate at the door and our well established 83% set rate and 75% show rate, a member of our dealer group would give us 155 sold units. Sound like a better plan?